The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

HEARTSTOPPER by Frank M. Robinson

Frank M. Robinson (b.1926) is probably best known today as the coauthor (with Thomas Scortia) of The Glass Inferno (1974), one of the books from which the blockbuster film The Towering Inferno (1974) was made. Robinson’s first novel was The Power (1956), about a malignant superman, which was filmed in 1967. Most of Robinson’s work is either science fiction or technothriller, though he has also written more straightforward thrillers as with Death of a Marionette (1995), with Paul Hull. The following story was specially written for this anthology.

Maxwell Harrison sat at his teakwood desk wearing a ratty cotton bathrobe, his scrawny hands hanging limply at his side. His head was face down on the leather-trimmed blotter, a loose strand of silver hair moving slightly in the breeze from an unseen air-conditioner. A morning newspaper had been opened to the financial section and was lying on top of the desk, carefully aligned to the left edge. A rolodex in a leather holder kept it company. The phone was carefully aligned on the right side of the desk. In the middle a tablet of ruled yellow paper served as a pillow for Harrison’s head. So far as I could see, the tablet was blank.

There were no stab or bullet wounds – again, that I could see, no purple bruise marks on his throat, no pudding of matted hair, blood, and brains covering the back of his head.

Nevertheless, Harrison was quite dead.

O’Brien, the fat little coroner, fussed around the body, making absolutely sure of what was already obvious. He shifted the chair back slightly and tilted Harrison’s torso so that his head lolled against the back of the chair.

We both stared.

Harrison had died with a smile on his face. Quite a broad one, as a matter of fact, with just a suggestion of having been startled. Death had caught him unaware.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Heart attack.”

“Probably,” O’Brien said. “Maybe poison, but unlikely. Not with that smile.” He stared a moment longer, then reached over and closed the eyes.

“He had a history,” the secretary said casually. “He kept some pills in the top middle drawer – I had it refilled yesterday.”

I reached around the body, located the small plastic bottle and passed it over to O’Brien without comment. The secretary and the chauffeur were standing by the huge mahogany entrance doors to the library, trying hard to hide their nervousness. The secretary’s name was Sally – how long had it been since “Sally” was a popular name? – Fitzgerald. She was blondish, mid-thirties, just beginning to plump up though the formal cut of her suit hid it well. Not too much makeup, hair coiled at the back of her head. I guessed “Efficiency” was her middle name.

Mike Breall, the chauffeur, was in his mid-twenties, dark haired with a thin, handsome face. Cut his hair right and he might have modelled for Calvin Klein underwear, or maybe perfume. I guessed he didn’t like being there, but then who would? I was there as insurance against rumours. San Joselito – little San Jose – is in the heart of Silicon Valley where there are more millionaires than plumbers. Somebody from homicide always teams up with the coroner to make sure “no signs of foul play” is prominent in news stories when somebody rich bites it.

Property values are very important in San Joselito.

“When did you find him, Miss Fitzgerald?”

“Around eleven, he usually gave me instructions for his brokers then. I called in Mike – Mr Breall – immediately. Then we phoned you people.” She hesitated. “Mr Harrison was… just like that.”

“Neither of you touched him?”

They shook their heads in unison.

“You didn’t see him earlier?”

“Matty – she’s the cook – brought him his orange juice and toast at nine and I came in with her to get the servant assignments for the day. Mr Breall usually goes out to the driveway to pick up the morning paper and he came in about the same time.”

I couldn’t get over the smile.

“And between nine and eleven?”

“We met in the kitchen right after nine and had a little brunch and I passed out the assignments for the day.”

“And all of the servants were there?”

She nodded, only slightly curious.

“So nobody else came in between nine and eleven?”

“I don’t see how they could have. All the servants were in the kitchen and there are dogs on the grounds. We would have known if anybody had come to the door… or if there were prowlers.”

“I should send in the crew,” O’Brien said. “You through?” I nodded. Miss Harrison and Breall started for the door and I said, “Please don’t leave – wait for me in the living room. And tell the cook to wait as well. It won’t take long.”

I paused at the door for one last look before the coroner’s men with the gurney showed up. Maxwell Harrison was an anomaly in town. Early eighties – far older than the young computer mavens who had struck it rich and settled there. Harrison was the Old Money in town and could probably have bought and sold any two or three of the youngsters. Wife had died years before; he lived alone except for the servants. So far as anybody knew, he kept busy clipping coupons and watching over his investments – and there were a lot of them.

I walked back to the desk and took another look at the broad smile on his face. Smiles have classifications and the one I would have compared his to was the smile on a football coach when his team has just made it to one of the bowl games. Or that of a stockbroker who just sold short and made another million or two.

It was a fleck of white that caught my eye, something I had missed the first time. I pried the small piece of folded paper from his stiffening fingers, glanced at it and slipped it in my pocket. No help there, just a scrawled bunch of numbers. Then I picked up the newspaper and stuck it under my arm – save the trouble of buying one on the way home.

It turned out they were all the evidence there was. And all the evidence that was needed. At least for justice, if not for law.

The cook was in her sixties, slightly deaf, and had worked for Harrison less than six months. Yes, all the servants had met in the kitchen after nine and yes, it had turned into something of a kaffeklatsch that had lasted until eleven. Had she liked Mr Harrison as an employer? She shrugged and I gathered he was no better nor worse than a dozen others she’d worked for. I took down her address and phone number, asked her to keep in touch and to let the department know if she moved from the area.

Sally Fitzgerald was hardly more informative.

“You’ve worked for Mr Harrison for how long?” Slog work – no smart questions, no special insights, simple Q and A.

“Fifteen years-” A moment of thought. “Closer to sixteen.”

“And you’re-?”

A flash of… what?

“Thirty-eight.”

Which made her twenty-two when she started. Not impossible but… a little young for a secretary. Maybe she’d been hired as something else. “Paid companion” as the tabloids might say. Harrison would have been in his late sixties, just becoming aware that life and love and lust were passing him by. By the time the arrangement had devolved to the hand-holding stage, she had become his secretary. On-the-job training.

And I could be doing her a deep injustice and have it all wrong. She was smart for her years, she’d gone to secretarial school, he was in the middle of acquisitions and mergers and she was just what the entrepreneur in him had ordered.

Curse me for being a dirty-minded, middle-aged man.

“He was a generous employer?”

“I never had any complaints.” Very cool.

“He was a fucking old miser,” Breall broke in, angry.

Sally glanced at him with just a trace of contempt. Very, very cool.

I raised an eyebrow and Breall said, “He only cared about money. It’s all the old bastard ever talked about.”

“What should he have talked about?”

Breall wasn’t about to forget his grudge. “I once asked him for an advance. My folks needed a loan, hospital stuff. He wouldn’t even listen to me.”

“And you’d worked for him for how long?”

Sally answered for him, a little acidly. “Six months.”

I kept my eyes on Breall. “I take it Mr Harrison wasn’t much of a sportsman – never talked about baseball or world soccer or anything like that.”

He gave me a fishy look – I was putting him on – then shrugged. I could have told him that the only game left for Harrison in his old age had been stocks and bonds and buyouts and they’re not something you can chat about with twenty-five-year-old chauffeurs. But the antagonism was pretty standard. Harrison had a lot of money and Breall had very little, if any.

Unfair.

I asked a few more questions, then gave them the same instructions I’d given the cook. Stay in touch and stick around.

What was important was not what they’d said but what they hadn’t. Breall was probably right. All Harrison had cared about was money. No hobbies had been mentioned, no parties, no guests, no friends, no relatives dropping by. An old man counting his coins and hoping he got to God knows how many millions before life foreclosed on him.

As for Sally, she had shed no tears, had looked neither bereaved nor distraught nor even unhappy at the loss of her employer of almost sixteen years.

I started for the door and Breall pointed to the couch. “You forgot your paper.”

I said “Thanks,” retrieved it and watched them as they walked out the door and down the walk. They weren’t holding hands but it almost seemed as if they were in lockstep. I stared until they disappeared around the corner of the house and wondered if they were going to his rooms or hers.

O’Brien had been waiting by his car. He was staring after them, too. “Quite a pair, aren’t they?”

“Why do you say ‘pair’?”

“For the same reasons you’re thinking,” he wheezed. “And I think we’re both wrong. No knives, no guns, no struggle and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Harrison didn’t eat anything that fatally disagreed with him. Somewhere between nine and eleven he bought the Big One.”

He suddenly frowned. “Look, Sam, trust me. He was alone that morning, nobody else was around, and there are no signs anybody hit him, stabbed him, shot him or strangled him. He died of old age – some people do, you know.”

“They pay me to be suspicious,” I said. “You find out anything different, you let me know.”

“You’ll be the first, Sam.” Then, curious: “What are you going to do?”

“Wait until they leave, then take out the garbage.”

It was an hour until Breall left in his Honda, Sally beside him. I’d spent the time sitting in my own car around the corner, reading the paper.

I was going to have to buy one, after all. The Local News section was missing.

Bummer.

I saw O’Brien three days later in his office. He had his feet up, his hands across his paunch, staring out the window at a pleasantly green and sunny spring day. His eyes were at half mast; I’d interrupted the start of his afternoon siesta.

“On your way out, tell Coral not to let you back in without notifying me first.”

“It’s always nice to feel welcome,” I said. I helped myself to a cup of lukewarm coffee from the Mr Coffee on the filing cabinet, then made myself comfortable in the battered easy chair facing his desk.

“I thought you were going to let me know all about Harrison, from his broken heart to the tattoo on his heinie.”

He yawned and opened his eyes wide for a moment, then swivelled around to face me.

“No tattoo and nothing to tell you about his heart that you don’t already know.”

“I made a guess,” I said. “I didn’t say I knew for a fact.”

“Sudden heart failure, Sam – I’ll send over an official report in the morning. Somewhere around ten in the morning the old pump decided to give up the ghost and it was all over in a second or two. Don’t think he felt a thing. Maybe a brief warning and ping, that was it. Doc Sturdevant was surprised he lasted as long as he did. Didn’t eat right, never got out, pressure of business… After eighty or so, it’s all borrowed time anyway. He lived life the way we all do, which is never the right way. Hell, when I was in private practice I never followed the advice I gave my patients. You might live longer but who the hell would want to?”

I picked a newspaper out of his wastebasket and started leafing through it professionally, starting with the comics first.

O’Brien looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Don’t you have an office of your own you can waste time in? Or did you drop by to tell me something?”

I hesitated, struck by a headline, but not exactly sure of why I had hesitated.

“The saga of the secretary and the chauffeur,” I said. “Or, to be more accurate, the tale of the secretary – no pun intended.”

O’Brien leaned forward, suddenly interested.

“And?”

“Harrison had no relatives, no deep philanthropic interests, he hadn’t contributed a dime to his Alma Mater in years so it was unlikely he remembered it in his will. And as a matter of fact, he didn’t. Guess who his ‘great and good friend’ was who inherits?”

“Our gal Sal.”

I nodded.

“Very sharp; those afternoon naps help. His attorney let me see his Living Trust. Sally doesn’t have to wait for probate, she can cash in right away.”

“What happened to attorney – client privilege?”

I yawned; the chair was too damned comfortable. “Come on, it’s a small town, everybody knows where the bodies are buried and besides, he owed me a favour.”

O’Brien looked thoughtful.

“So she had motive.”

“She didn’t seem heartbroken that Harrison had shuffled off.” I looked expectant. “I was hoping you could tell me how.”

“How she did it? She didn’t. Nobody did. God pulled the rug out from under him and that was that. Judging from the smile on his face, it wasn’t all that bad.”

I stood up and started to drop the newspaper back in the basket beneath his desk, then stopped and stared at the headlines. Damn. Our modern society. If they recycled the news every few days, nobody would ever notice. I’d been hitting on three-day-old headlines.

Then I remembered where I had seen them before and sat back down.

“You got the rest of this?”

“In the trash basket, help yourself. Coral’s on a work slowdown, she only empties it once a week.”

I pawed through the papers and found the missing news section for the paper on Harrison’s desk. I had to leaf through it twice before I realized what I was looking for.

Then I figured I knew how. I also doubted there was any jury on God’s green earth that would send Sally Fitzgerald or Mike Breall to the slammer.

I went back to the Harrison mansion the next day, along with O’Brien – I hadn’t told him much and he was dying of curiosity – and a couple of uniforms just in case.

Sally had let her hair down – a nice cascade of blonde – and changed out of her suit-like uniform into something looser and more appealing. For mid-thirties, she was doing very nicely. Breall had ditched his chauffeur uniform and looked more like an ageing delinquent than he had the day before. His personality fit his appearance – surly, apprehensive, defiant and if he had been any younger, I would have called him snotty.

I looked at Sally and said how sorry I was she had lost such a good friend and employer.

“I’ll live,” she said.

She was handling her grief real well, I thought.

“Mr Harrison died of natural causes,” I said.

That cheered them both up, though Sally still looked uneasily at the two uniforms by the door. I stared at Breall.

“How badly did you hate Mr Harrison?”

“I told you I thought-” He caught the warning look from Sally and shot a quick glance at the uniforms. “Not that badly.” Then, blurting: “I thought you said he died of natural causes?”

“Falling down a flight of stairs can be an accident,” I said. “Unless somebody pushes you. And for a guy with a bad heart, walking up behind him and yelling ‘boo!’ might qualify you for a homicide rap.”

A frown. “I didn’t-” And then he caught another look from Sally and shut up. He could drive a limo and he must have been good in bed, otherwise I couldn’t understand why Sally put up with him. But then, she hadn’t planned to for very long.

I took the piece of crumpled paper out of my pocket and pushed the yellow tablet to the front of the desk. I crooked my finger toward Breall and he reluctantly walked over.

“Do me a favour, Mike, and write the following numbers on the paper.” He hesitated, then picked up the pencil. “Thirty-six,” I said. “Fifty-four, twelve, eleven, forty-five and twenty-two.”

He slowly printed them out and I compared them to the figures on the paper. The handwriting experts could probably prove they matched up.

Now it was Sally’s turn.

“Would you call Mr Harrison a gambler?”

She shook her head. Cool but wary.

“Not at all. He was very shrewd in making investments-”

“But it amused him to play the state lottery, didn’t it?”

She froze. “I… really don’t know.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do,” I said. “He never left the house so you would’ve had to buy the lottery tickets for him. You or Mike. There were a lot of discarded tickets in the trash.’

Her face was a mask.

“I bought him anything he wanted. I might have bought him some tickets.”

I wasn’t paying much attention to either she or Breall – that was the uniforms’ job. I opened up the drawer where Harrison had kept his pills. Three tickets; I had spotted them when I’d first checked for his pills but hadn’t thought anything of them. One of them had all the numbers that Breall had written down.

I sighed and leaned back in the chair, fanning the tickets between my fingers, then opened the three-day old section of newspaper that I’d found in O’Brien’s office.

“When Harrison found that the Local News section was missing from his newspaper – the section that always prints the lottery results, the section you removed before giving him the paper, Mike – he asked you to find out the winning numbers. Sally knew the numbers on his tickets – she had seen them when she refilled his prescription. She gave you a set of six, you copied them down and gave them to Harrison. What was the jackpot? Fifty-five million? Harrison was a businessman so he always went through the financial pages first, before he indulged himself and checked the numbers you gave him against his lottery tickets. Of course, he didn’t have the winning numbers. He just thought he did.”

I looked up at the now-pale Breall. “Harrison thought he’d finally hit the Big One and the excitement was too much for his heart.”

Sally was acid.

“That’s not much of a case.”

“You were with him for sixteen years, Sally, you probably knew his medical condition better than he did. For a heart patient, good news can be as bad as bad news. Harrison had to avoid stress – and you hit him with a ton of it.”

“The old bastard died happy,” Breall chimed in, bitter.

“Shut up,” Sally said dully. “They can’t hold us.”

I nodded to the uniforms. “Not for me to judge,” I said. “But I think you’ll have to delay that trip to the Bahamas.”

Breall was a quicker study than I thought. He whirled on Sally. “What trip?”

I played it innocent.

“Lois at the travel agency said that you would be gone for a month, right, Sally? A real gossip, Lois. She couldn’t understand why you’d be going by yourself.”

The uniforms grabbed Breall just as he lunged at her.

“That was dirty pool,” O’Brien said. We were at the local McDonald’s and O’Brien was on his second Big Mac and fries.

I’d ordered coffee and was nibbling on some of the fries out of his basket.

“Murder’s murder, whether Harrison was cheated out of two more days or another decade. Sally got impatient – she could see the best years of her life slipping by. Breall was a wild card. He was a recent hire and as the chauffeur probably had as much face time with Harrison as she did. She had a foolproof plan and enlisted Mike to cover all bases just in case.”

“Flimsy stuff,” O’Brien said around his hamburger. “It won’t stand up.”

I shrugged. “A lot of murder cases are made of flimsy stuff. But if they get off, they still won’t be a pair of happy campers. I suspect by now that love has turned pretty sour.”

O’Brien blinked owlishly at me.

“They’ll be at each other’s throats.”

I sprayed one of his fries with catsup.

“Ain’t that a shame,” I said.